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Advanced Seminars

Advanced Seminars Registration:

If you intend to participate to one or more advances seminars, please let us know by sending an email to mdm2013@di.unimi.it with subject "advanced seminars participation". In the email body, please specify which advanced seminar(s) you plan to attend. Attendance is free (included in conference registration).

With the convergence of mobile communication, sensors and online social networks technologies, we are witnessing an exponential increase in the creation and consumption of personal data. Paper-based interactions, analog processes (e.g., resource metering) or mechanical interactions are now sources of digital data that can be linked to individuals. This personal data is recognized by the World Economic Forum as a most valuable resource comparable to "The new oil" creating an unprecedented potential for applications and business.

Until now, enthusiasm for these new opportunities has thwarted privacy concerns. Nevertheless, current practices are often not compliant with basic privacy directives. In addition, data leaks are frequent and anyone may exploit too weak privacy policies. Worse, underlying business models are even based on breaches of users' privacy. Hence, the risk of a backlash is growing, while many laudable projects cannot be build on such bases. Should humanitarian aid workers build their applications if they cannot provide privacy guarantees? Many applications, undoubtedly useful, but placing respect for human dignity and privacy upfront, are thus left by the wayside.

The nature of the solution is consensual: it is necessary to increase the control that individuals have over their personal data. However, any centralized solution unavoidably faces three intrinsic problems:

users are hostages of sudden changes in privacy policies;

their data can be exposed by negligence or because they are regulated by too weak policies;

users are exposed to sophisticatedattacks, whose benefit/cost ratio is high.

Decentralized solutions do not exhibit these limitations. For example, the Personal Data Server (PDS) embeds a database in a tamper-resistant token on the user's side. Privileges can be managed by PDS holders and enforced by other PDSs. Many other projects are emerging on decentralized architectures.

In this seminar, we review existing solutions for personal data management, present a functional architecture for such decentralized alternatives, expose recent techniques dealing with embedded data management and global query processing in this architecture, and conclude by presenting existing and future implementations.

AS2: Crowdsourcing for Mobile Data Management

Georgios Chatzimilioudis (University of Cyprus, Cyprus)

Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti (University of Cyprus, Cyprus)

Location: “Aula 3”

Tuesday 4th of June 2013 2:00pm-3:30pm

Session Chair: Takahiro Hara (Osaka University)

Abstract:

Crowdsourcing refers to a distributed problem-solving model in which a crowd of undefined size is engaged to solve a complex problem through an open call. This novel problem-solving model found its way into numerous applications on the web for voting, fund-raising, micro-works and wisdom-of-the-crowd scenarios. On the other hand, the shift of desktop users to mobile platforms in the post-PC era, along with the unique multi-sensing capabilities of modern mobile devices are expected to eventually unfold the full potential of Crowdsourcing. This is true, as smartphones offer a great platform for extending and diversifying web-based crowdsourcing applications to a larger contributing crowd, making contribution easier and omnipresent.

This advanced seminar presents the fundamental concepts behind crowdsourcing and its applications to mobile data management. In the first part of the seminar, we will overview the crowdsourcing landscape from a variety of perspectives, with a particular emphasis on the latest data management trends. In the second and more extended part of the seminar, we will focus on an in-depth coverage of emerging mobile crowdsourcing architectures and systems, through a multi-dimensional taxonomy that will address location, sensing, power, performance, big-data and privacy among others. Furthermore, we will overview a number of in-house crowdsourcing prototypes we have developed and deployed over the last few years. The seminar concludes with challenges, opportunities and new directions in the field.

AS3: Social Networking and Mobility: A Data Management Perspective

Mohamed Sarwat (University of Minnesota, USA)

Mohamed F. Mokbel (University of Minnesota, USA)

Location: “Aula 3”

Wednesday 5th of June 2013 11:00am-12:30pm

Session Chair: Takahiro Hara (Osaka University)

Abstract:

Online social networks, such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter have become very popular in the last decade. For instance, the number of Facebook users has reached one billion monthly active users as of October 2012. Users register to online social networks in order to keep in touch with their friends and family, learn about their news, get recommendations from them, and engage in online social events.

As mobile devices (e.g., smart phones, GPS devices) became ubiquitous, location-based social networking services (e.g., BrightKite, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places) are getting
more and more popular. Users, in a location-based social networking website, can select their friend list as well as getting listed as friends to other users in a same way like traditional social
networking systems. In addition, users are associated with a geo-location, and might alert friends when visiting a venue (e.g., restaurant, bar) by checking-in on their mobile phones. The rise of location-based social networking applications has led to the emergence of both social networking and mobility side by side which opened new research challenges and opportunities.

This seminar consists of two parts:

Part I presents the history and early attempts of combining social networking and mobility. Then, we explain the functionality of nowadays location-based social networking systems and how rich the data generated by such systems is. We therefore give an overview of recent research work that lies at the intersection of both social networking and mobility.

Part II of the seminar presents multiple perspectives of the state-of-the-art GeoSocial systems and applications (i.e., query processing, recommendation, analytics, visualization, crowdsourcing). We also highlight the risks and threats that result from combining Geo and Social, and we conclude the seminar by summarizing and presenting some open research directions.